Rain foiled enemy pilot’s
plan to start a forest fire

By Finn J.D. John
February 4, 2024

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a rewritten and re-researched version of a much shorter article published July 10, 2009, which you can find here.

AROUND 6 A.M. on the morning of Sept. 9, 1942, Forest Service lookout Howard Gardner heard the sound of an approaching airplane.

Peering out into the South Coast pre-dawn gloaming light, Gardner made out a small seaplane, heading toward him, flying low, circling.

Showtime! This was what Gardner was here for, bundled up in the little Forest Service firewatch lookout shack atop Mt. Emily. Nine months into the Second World War, Gardner’s duties had expanded a bit from what they had been a year before. Now he was looking not only for smoke from forest fires, but for enemy airplanes.

And right then, that’s exactly what he was looking at. If there had been more light, he would probably have been able to make out the bright red “meatball” insignias painted on the seaplane’s fuselage. He was looking at a Yokosuka E14Y, a tiny observation plane that had crossed the Pacific Ocean aboard an Imperial Japanese Navy submarine, the I-25 — the same doughty boat that had shelled Fort Stevens with its 140-mm. (5.5-inch) deck gun three months earlier.

Now this intrepid submarine crew, captained by Lieutenant Commander Mieji Tagami, was doubling down on that historic attack by launching the first airstrike of the war against the United States.

THE PLAN HAD been developed by Warrant Officer Nobuo Fujita, the pilot of the little seaplane. His plan was to drop a pair of 170-pound firebombs deep in the forests of Oregon, hoping to start an unstoppable wildfire.

So now, tucked into their flimsy little seaplane behind a relatively puny 340-horsepower Hitachi Tempu engine and droning along at a fuel-sipping cruising speed of just over 100 miles an hour, Fujita and his observer/bombardier, Shoji Okuda, were on an audacious mission to firebomb a continent.

And atop a nearby coastal mountain on the edge of that continent, Howard Gardner was on the telephone reporting the sighting of their airplane to Aircraft Warning System operator Rita Ganong, who was stationed in the Forest Service’s Gold Beach headquarters taking calls from all the AWS stations in the area.

Ganong passed along word of the sighting — small floatplane, small displacement radial engine, type unknown, circling low near Brookings — to the “filter center” in Roseburg.

She may not have mentioned one minor detail, though, which would turn out to be important: While she was on the phone with Gardner, Gardner said he saw what looked like a small suitcase falling from the airplane.

It was, of course, not a suitcase.

EVEN IF THE falling “luggage” had been reported, it would never have occurred to anyone on the scene that they could actually be looking at an Imperial Japanese warplane, circling low in the skies over the national forest. True, the AWS had been formed to watch for enemy planes; but none had ever seen one, on the West Coast at least. Most of their sightings had been of friendly aircraft, and on more than one occasion their reports had saved the lives of American aviators when they got in trouble.

Plus, the Japanese planes they’d been drilled to recognize were crates like the Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bombers, Aichi D3A “Val” dive bombers, and of course the Mitsubishi A6M “Zeke” Type-Zero fighters. Nobody was drilling for recognition of tiny float planes like this one. Plus, who would choose something like this to attack with? It would be like charging an enemy foxhole with a Daisy Red Ryder. It made no sense.

So Gardner and Ganong naturally assumed that this pint-size seaplane with the tinny-sounding engine was a friendly. Accordingly, they reported it in the same kind of routine way they would have if it had been a squadron of Army Air Corps C-47s flying by.

And anyway, even if it were an enemy, how much damage could such a tiny plane really do?

Well, the answer to that was “plenty,” but … only if it had arrived just a few days earlier than it did, in the middle of the fire season.

However, as it turned out, Fujita and Okuda were about 48 hours too late. The fall rains had already started just a day or two before. Plus, they were dropping their bombs at 6:30 in the morning, which, as every logger knows, is just about the safest time of the day when it comes to fire hazards.

These bombs were very specialized items. They were made not to explode, but to ignite and distribute chunks of burning thermite over a wide area.

The bombs did ignite fires, or rather one of them did; but it was nothing that couldn’t be easily suppressed. After the morning fog lifted, Gardner saw and reported the wispy trail of smoke, and was sent to help deal with the fire. Joined by about half a dozen other Forest Service workers, he grabbed his shovel and got busy. They found a little over a dozen small fires burning fitfully here and there around a small impact crater. These were quickly beaten down.

They also found pieces of the bomb that ignited them … with Japanese writing engraved on them.

The second bomb that Fujita dropped apparently didn’t go off. Playing it safe, he was dropping them from very low, and they weren’t falling far enough for the fins to fully stabilize them. The one that did go off sliced sideways through a tree on the way down and burst open like an egg on impact. The second one probably just plunged into the ground and buried itself in the forest duff. Almost certainly it, or what remains of it, is still lying where it fell more than 80 years ago.

BY THE TIME Gardiner and his colleagues got to the scene of the bombing with their shovels, of course, Fujita and Okuda were long since back safe and sound on the submarine … well, safe and sound-ish. Actually it was a very near thing. They had no sooner disassembled and stowed their little float plane in its waterproof hangar when the I-25’s lookout shouted a warning. A two-engined bomber had emerged from a fog bank and was lining up on them.

The I-25 frantically dove for the safety of the deep. Behind and above, two colossal explosions shook the boat. The lights went out, leaving the crew in pitch darkness briefly, and the boat lurched a bit as some of its compartments flooded.

In the air above, Army pilot Jean Daugherty of the 390th Bomb Squadron, 42nd Bombardment Group, was at the controls of his Lockheed Hudson bomber, trying to circle back around and see if he had hit anything and take another shot if he hadn’t. He saw no sign of the submarine, and no oil slick or debris. Concluding that it had been a clean miss, Daugherty and his crew radioed in a report and headed back to their home airfield at McChord.

Meanwhile, the I-25 was resting comfortably on the bottom of the harbor at Port Orford while the crew hustled around repairing the damage to the boat. It turned out to be minor. But it’s very likely the reason there were still two unused firebombs aboard the I-25 when it returned to Japan a month later. If that bomber had arrived just 10 minutes sooner, while they were still on the surface stowing away the airplane, they would all be dead, and everyone knew it.

THE NEXT RUN happened almost three weeks later; Fujita had wanted to go sooner, but the seaplane could only be used when the seas were calm, so they just had to wait until they were.

This time, Captain Tajiri ordered his submariners to launch Fujita and Okuda in the middle of the night — thinking the enemy would probably be expecting them this time, and having darkness as a cover would give them a little more protection.

So sometime after midnight on Sept. 29, on Fujita’s signal, the air-powered catapult railgunned the little plane into the night sky like a kid throwing a paper airplane, and they were on their way once again.

This time, Fujita used the lighthouse at Cape Blanco as a navigation aid, since he was flying at night. He buzzed on past it, picked a random spot in the middle of the woods, signaled Okuda to release the bombs, and headed back out to sea past the lighthouse.

By the time the bombs were dropped, it was after 5 a.m. and the forest was heavy with morning dew, and still soaked by the early season rains. One of the bombs didn’t explode, but the other one did; nearby Forest Service lookouts saw the flash and called it in. But by the time the sun was high enough to see, there was no smoke. The fires the bomb had lit had fizzled out in the damp forest.

IT WAS AFTER that second run that the Japanese aviators came closest to scoring a kill — three kills, actually.

Louis Amort, an Oregon Department of Forestry engineer, was in the area with two coworkers when he heard the report of the bombing. Eager to get to the scene and put out any fires that might have been started, the three of them hurried to the spot where the flash had been reported.

They easily found the scene. At this location, Okuda had released both bombs at the same time. The bomb that had failed to explode had hit something hard and shattered into pieces. Bits of the other bomb were scattered all over the place, and blackened trees and brush showed where the fire had burned and sputtered out in the rain-damp, dew-soaked brush.

The three men immediately got busy picking up bits of bomb to turn over to the Army. That meant fragments of the bomb that had gone off, and several large pieces of the one that had not.

These unexploded pieces were cylindrical casings, pods with thermite pellets and individual detonators inside.

Speaking 48 years later to Salem Statesman Journal reporter Hank Arends, Amort said they “picked them up and put them in a paper sack or wrapped them in a blanket and put them in the glove box.”

Amort told local historian and Brookings bombing expert Bill McCash that this included bits of the unexploded bomb three inches in diameter and 10 to 12 inches long.

Then they drove through the very bumpy terrain around the bomb site back to town, where they turned the bits of unexploded firebomb over to an Army liaison officer.

Presumably, the Army officer handled them with greater care than Amort and his friends, who only afterward realized what an enormous risk they’d just taken by stuffing a live firebomb in their glove compartment and setting off four-wheeling down a Jeep trail back to town.

AS FOR FUJITA and Okuda, they got lost trying to get back to the submarine. Finally, nearly out of gas and growing desperate, they spotted an oil slick in the ocean. Flying low over it, they found the I-25 close by, and soon their little Yokosuka was being hauled aboard and stowed away, and they were being debriefed.

I have been unable to learn the source of the oil slick. But remember, the I-25 had been damaged a couple weeks earlier by Jean Daugherty and his crew in the Lockheed bomber. It would be one of the supreme ironies of the war if an attack by a U.S. warplane was the primary cause of Fujita and Okuda finding their way back to their sub safe and sound rather than ending up as shark bait twenty miles off the coast. The two aviators had made a plan for what they would do if that happened. They intended to shoot holes in the plane’s pontoons with their revolvers, sinking it, and saving the last bullet for themselves.

Okuda, by the way, went out in a blaze of glory late in the war after volunteering to fly a Kamikaze mission. Fujita was tapped for Kamikaze service too, but the war ended before his number came up. As for the I-25, it was sunk by American destroyer U.S.S. Patterson near Vanatu in 1943, with all hands.

By 1943, though, “all hands” did not include Captain Tajiri. He and Fujita both survived the war, and shared their recollections from it later with historian Bert Webber. Fujita, the pilot who flew over Brookings to set America on fire, was invited back to Brookings after the war. He was basically given the key to the city, and he donated his family’s samurai sword to his former foes. It was a remarkable and heart-warming ending to the saga, but it’s a story for another day.

IT TOOK SOME time for the U.S. War Department to figure out how a Japanese float plane had managed to get to Curry County. They did not at first know about the “erector-set airplanes” carried in subs like the I-25. For months after the bombing, a flood of FBI agents was dispatched into the boonies around the Coast Range, seeking remote mountain lakes that might have secret Japanese seaplane bases on them. Of course, nobody ever found anything, but a number of FBI agents had a great time hiking and horsebacking and fishing in the Oregon backcountry before the brass finally figured it out.

(Sources: Bombs Over Brookings, a book by William McCash published in 2005 by Maverick Publishing; Silent Siege, a book by Bert Webber published in 1984 by Ye Galleon Press; “Salem Man Recalls Japanese Bombing,” an article by Hank Arends published in the May 14, 1990, issue of the Salem Statesman Journal.)

TAGS: #HowardGardner #AWS #AircraftWarningSystem #USFS #MountEmily #Yokosuka#14Y #ImperialJapanese #SubmarineI25 #MeijiTagami #NobuoFujita #ShojiOkuda #RitaGanong #JeanDaugherty #LockheedHudson #PortOrford #CapeBlanco #LouisAmort #HankArends #BillMcCash #BertWebber #COAST #CURRYcounty